\chapter{Life-Cycle of Symbian}
\label{chap:lifecycle}

Symbian had been one of the most successful technological developments in the field of mobile-ICT  for a decade \citep{BEST}. The success of Symbian went over the top but in a very short period of time it has descended to a level where it is almost unknown. This is considered as one of the biggest failures in the field of mobile-ICT both from a technological as well as a business point of view. We will here present the different stages that Symbian went through from its foundation to its extinction.

\subsection*{Brief History of Symbian} 
In 1998 Symbian ltd. was founded by American PDA manufacturer, Psion, in partnership with the world's largest handset manufacturers of that time (Nokia, Motorola, Ericsson) where Psion had the highest share and rest three with the equal share of 23.1\% each. Later on Symbian was joined by Matsushita (Panasonic), Siemens and Samsung as shareholders. 

The core idea behind creating Symbian ltd. was to develop a common platform for mobile phones for all the handset manufacturers, which could later on develop as an open platform. They also thought that by developing such platform they could prevent Microsoft from winning the market and creating proprietary standards (de-facto standards) in mobile OS as they did in PC operating systems \citep[p. 5]{WESTWOOD2}. \bigskip

\noindent In 2000 Symbian was joined by Sony, Sanyo and Kenwood as licensees. Also  during this year the first Symbian OS phone, R380, was launched by Ericsson. Moreover, Fujitsu and Siemens became licensees of Symbian in the year 2002. With all this gaining popularity and increasing number of licensees, Symbian came up with the vision of ``Symbian OS in every phone.'' \citep[p. 7]{ANCARANI} However, Symbian could not maintain its success and prevent the extinction of its own as well as its platform. Although from an outer view it can be clearly seen that the reason for extinction of Symbian was the tough competition from its two biggest rivals - Apple's iOS platform and Google's Android platform - but the inner study of strategies and platform formations indicates some other aspects that prevented its survival in the market, in spite of being a first mover in the market. 

\subsection*{Key People of Symbian}
The founding CEO of Symbian was Colly Meyers who left Symbian in 2002 without explanation for his departure \citep{LETTICE}. Then a previous member of the  supervisory board, David Levin, became CEO from 2002 until 2005. He left Symbian because of his dissatisfaction in compromising the strategic position of Symbian (Track 2: 2:33). After David left in the year 2005 the new CEO appointed for Symbian was Niggel Clifford, who served as a CEO till 2008 when the company was taken over by Nokia.


\subsection*{The Early Alliances of Symbian}
Symbian has been very active in creating a network of partner companies in order to increase its resources and customer base. In January 1999, Symbian joined the Oracle database to expand the range of business solutions for 'mobile enterprise computing' and in the same year, in April, Symbian made an alliance with Sun Microsystems to allow the development of software in Java. Beside this, the shareholders of Symbian also formed alliances with different companies. Motorola made an agreement with Cisco for networking applications and also Motorola's link with Netscape was tied to this alliance and to AOL and Sun. In October 1999, Nokia signed an agreement with 3Com to allow EPOC to be used as a standard operating system for new devices and the interfaces of Palm, commonly used in mobile telephones, and the optical pen. In March 1999 Symbian made an agreement with NTT, where NTT agreed to license Symbian OS to support its FOMA 3G network. In February 2000, Symbian and IBM joined together to develop a PDA based on EPOC software.  In the same year 'GPRS Application Alliance' was formed together with Ericsson, IBM, Oracle, Lotus and Palm. This alliance was committed on the development and diffusion of the GPRS. Similarly, Symbian  made an alliance with Sony for using EPOC on all Sony PDAs  and further linked up with Intel to integrate EPOC with Intel's chip technology.

In April 2002, Siemens joined Symbian to become a shareholder. Samsung, Panasonic and Siemens also used Symbian OS and Nokia's S60 (series 60) user interface in their products. \citep[pp. 63-64]{ANCARANI}


\subsection*{Symbian as an Ecosystem}
Symbian as an ecosystem was developed on the base of assumption that smartphone ecosystems would be much more similar to that of PDAs \citep[p. 11]{WESTWOOD2}. Symbian's ecosystem consisted of:

\begin{itemize}
\item Network of its customers and complementers which included licensees, CPU vendors.
\item Other hardware and software suppliers.
\item User Interface companies.
\item Consultancies and training centers.
\item Network Operators and enterprise software developers.
\end{itemize}

\noindent Symbian's ecosystem model was initially based on its parent ecosystem i.e. Psion, but later they realized that with this model there was a lack of information for ISVs (Independent software vendors) and a lack of communication between licensees and ISVs. A new ecosystem strategy was applied i.e. an ad hoc ecosystem strategy although this model was used from 1998-2002 and Symbian tried to manage the phone manufacturers and ISVs, but in retrospect the company under-emphasized helping those companies that supported the phone manufacturers in creating devices, which led to a delay in the availability of new phones and thus new Symbian customers.

To provide the adequate support to 'License Suppliers' a new 'Platinum Partner' program or strategy was launched. The main difference of this program with the previous or ad hoc strategy was that preference was given to device creating partners rather than ISVs and a desire to systematize the efforts of running many different partner programs to obtain benefits of scale through having common development kits, event management, billing systems, and communication systems \citep[p. 16]{WESTWOOD2}.

This Platinum Program helped in the rapid development of the company. As the ecosystem rapidly grew in size Symbian's management felt the conflict in choosing 'quantity' of partners or 'quality' of partners. Because of the lack of resources to keep track of the contacts, providing technical support to all the  partners and running larger partner events, Symbian's management chose the quality approach. Under this approach partners were given different priorities. But overtime, Symbian realized that this prioritization hindered innovation and flow of useful information among the ecosystem members. When realizing this, the restrictions among the partners were removed. \bigskip

\noindent In 2007 Symbian began developing a new partner program to meet two key objectives. The first was to increase the efficiency of the program through the enhanced use of IT, particularly increased web-based automation of common activities and creation of an improved Extranet to communicate with ecosystem members. The second was to utilize that increased efficiency in order to lower the price and broaden the reach of the program, particularly with independent software vendors \citep[p. 19]{WESTWOOD2}. Before this program was launched in 2008 Nokia completed acquisition of Symbian ltd., which ended up as an independent entity. In 2009 Symbian ltd. was turned into the Symbian Foundation to make the Symbian Platform available open source and royalty-free. In 2010,  Samsung and Sony Ericsson left Symbian, announcing plans to phase out use of the Symbian platform. \bigskip

\noindent Finally, Nokia also orphaned Symbian by selecting Windows OS as its smartphone platform, announcing plans to phase out of the Symbian platform as well.

\subsection*{Decreasing Market Share}

%\begin{figure}[H]
%\begin{center}
%\includegraphics[scale=0.63]{./Pictures/symbain_market_share.JPG}
%\end{center}
%\caption{The world wide smartphone sales in a table}
%\label{fig:smartphoneSales}
%\end{figure}

\begin{figure}[H]
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[scale=0.45]{./Pictures/World_Wide_Smartphone_Sales_Share.png}
\end{center}
\caption{The world wide smartphone sales in \% (Wiki:Smartphone)}
\label{fig:marketsales}
\end{figure}

\begin{figure}[H]
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[scale=0.5]{./Pictures/joBest.png}
\end{center}
\caption{Symbian smartphone market share in \% \citep{BEST}}
\label{fig:joBest}
\end{figure}

\begin{figure}[H]
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[scale=0.3]{./Pictures/PLC_Symbian.jpg}
\end{center}
\caption{Symbian's Life Cycle}
\label{fig:PLCSymbian}
\end{figure}

Figure \ref{fig:marketsales}\footnote{\url{http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_Wide_Smartphone_Sales_Share.png}} clearly shows that the world wide smartphone sales of Symbian started declining from the first quarter of 2007 which inherently led to a loss of market share, which can be seen in figure \ref{fig:joBest}. If we sketch a graph on the basis of its world wide market share, Symbian's lifecycle seems very similar to a Product Life Cycle (PLC) model. This can be seen in figure \ref{fig:PLCSymbian} \bigskip

\noindent The reason for comparing Symbian with a PLC model is to see different activities that occurred inside Symbian during different phases. The dotted line in the figure describes the data between 2000-2004, which could not be found, and the data from 2004-2012 was retrieved from Canalys, Symbian and Gartner. More milestones and events can be obtained from Appendix \ref{chap:milestones}.

From the figure above we can say that the years between 1998-2006 seem as golden years for Symbian where Symbian had the highest market shares. From 2007 Symbian's market shares declined as the two biggest competitors, Apple-IOS and Google-Android, showed up in the market. \bigskip

\noindent The Introduction stage was triggered because of the foundation of Symbian and lead over to the Growth stage, which indicates a movement to strategic segmentation and efficiencies in production \citep[p. 8]{LIFECYCLE}. The following stage is the Maturity stage, where the costs of distributing and marketing aspects are reduced and in comparison to the previous two stages, the quality and the differentiation of the product are increased. The last stage of the PLC is the Decline stage, which depends on the industry traits and the competitive strength of the product and the company.\bigskip

\noindent The sketch of the PLC starts in 2000, as the first Symbian phone was shipped at this time and the growth phase starts around 2001 with the shipment of Nokia's first Symbian phone. The start of the maturity we note back to 2004-2005 as Symbian reached 1000 employees, achieved 6 \% of market share in the US and its first operating profit. The decline phase arguably began in the end of 2007 - beginning of 2008, where first the iPhone arrived, Nokia bought all the shares and Android was launched.



%Data retrieved from Gartner:
% 2007-08 http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/910112
% 2009-10 http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/1543014
% 2011-12 http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/1622614
% 2004-06 \citep{BEST}